The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek happiness here and now. The lifestyle changed, and the culture blossomed. What will the next "great cultural revival" be like?

From scraps of 19th century science, our ancestors concocted a narrow frame—a "rigid and narrow" way to look at the world, which made us misunderstand and damage culture. Convenience—which identifies happiness with acquiring and experiencing what feels attractive—is a case in point.

When we look at the world through convenience, we shun knowledge and wisdom as irrelevant, because we already know what we want. The "pursuit of happiness" then becomes a practical matter—of acquiring it.

The key insight, which we are calling convenience paradox, is that convenience is a deceptive and paradoxical value.

That with striking consistency, the more convenient direction tends to lead to a less convenient condition.

When the convenience paradox is understood, we readily see that we in fact have no clue about the life's important question: What is really good for us?

What is really worth aiming for?

It is at that point that we begin to seek the information that illuminates basic questions.

We have introduced the holoscope as an academically founded method for creating and using that information.

When illuminated by the holoscope, our contemporary condition is seen in a completely new light—and a wealth of ways to improve it come to the foreground.

We here illustrate that by a few examples.

Political hygiene

Why do we have such faith in our senses?

Why do we trust the civilization that made convenience its goal?

Wholeness is obviously superior; and yet so precarious: We may have everything else in abundance—and a single nutrient missing in your diet will make it all futile.

Has civilization made us happier?

The truth of this matter is that we simply don't know! It is impossible to "step into someone's shoes" and feel how he feels; especially if that someone lived centuries ago, and didn't even have shoes.

So imagine an experiment, where a sufficiently large human population is divided into two groups. One group continues to live the civilized way, and the other in the way this population lived before it got civilized. What sort of differences would develop?

Such an experiment is, of course, practically impossible. And yet it did occur—not in a laboratory, but in reality. In early 20th century a number of world populations were living on the borderline of civilization, and experiencing the described division. Weston Price traveled around the globe visiting those populations, and recording the data. The results were published in a book titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Its message was that civilized nutrition was a step away from corporeal wholeness.

Price found that the people who lived in pre-civilized ways had a higher degree of wellbeing.